In the fast-paced information age, attention is the new currency. While information is abundant and cheap, attention is scarce and expensive. There are so many good things clamoring for our attention today than in eras past. But we still only have the same amount of attention to give. So the price of attention goes up.
“I’d much rather give a dollar than give a minute,” says my friend Eric Boles, “because I can make more dollars, but can’t make more time. Whenever I invest in people, which I certainly love to do, I exchange a moment of my life I’ll never get back. I want to make my investments wisely.”
Again, attention is scarce. We use the term, “Pay attention,” because attention is pay value. It is the currency of the modern age, something we choose to invest every waking moment of our lives.
Each day is about a thousand waking minutes. That’s our attention budget. If we imagine paying attention is like paying a dollar a minute, we’ve got an attention budget of a thousand bucks a day.
So, how do we spend our thousand bucks? Where do we invest it? How much do we invest in each area? On any given day, the frequency, duration, and intensity of our attention all add up to one thousand dollars to invest anywhere we’d like. And we invest every dollar, every day. Each time we invest attention in a specific area, it’s like we pull out our cognitive wallet and put money on the table. How many times do we pay attention to a certain thing? How many seconds or minutes do we pay? All these payments add up through the day, and at the end of the day, we’ve paid our thousand dollars.
Who and what got this “money”? How much money fluttered away in idle mental meanderings? Maybe today we spent a hundred dollars of attention worrying about our job, but only five dollars of attention doing our job well. One goal got a hundred bucks. Another got two. Still another got fifty cents. Every day, there’s an allocation of attention.
Our challenge, every day, is to spend wisely.
